


quickenings

by midrashic



Category: The Hour (TV)
Genre: 1950s, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Miscarriage, Post-Season/Series 02, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-02 06:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16781653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: After Cilenti, everything changes. Even for Marnie.





	quickenings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DetectiveJoan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/gifts).



> Canonfic set immediately after 2.06. Rated T for references to canon violence and sex.
> 
> Warnings: possible miscarriage, references to canonical domestic abuse, suicide, and sex work. 
> 
> For [DetectiveJoan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetectiveJoan/pseuds/DetectiveJoan). Blessed Yule!

They’re out the door and halfway to the car when they catch sight of her arguing with McCain. She looks fragile, her skin bruised with moonlight as she pulls away from him in a panic. Hector goes over, because of course he does. Marnie follows because—well, she’s not really sure why. She’s not sure why she does the rest of it, either.

“I can’t,” she’s saying, “I can’t, I can’t, there’s nowhere, nowhere for me to go—”

“What’s the matter?” Hector barges in like a knight on a massive destrier. It’s why Marnie loves him, in spite of… well, everything. Underneath all the cheating and the lying, Hector Madden has the heart of the hero after whom he was named.

“I’m trying to take Miss Delaine somewhere private for the night—” says McCain, peeved.

Her voice goes shrill. “And I’m telling you there _isn’t_ anywhere, nowhere they don’t know about—”

“Your mother?” Hector asks gently.

“She—she—she can’t know. Not about…”

“I see,” Hector says gravely. Marnie can see he’s at a loss. He glances at her sideways, probably wondering how she’ll take him offering the prostitute with whom he once cheated on her money for a hotel for the night. Marnie has a better idea.

“Why don’t you come with us, darling?” she says. Both men stop. Only Kiki Delaine doesn’t seem struck dumb, but that may be because she’s too frightened to have room for much of anything else.

“What?” she asks.

“What?” Hector says.

“No one will look for you at ours, I can assure you of that. And we have the space, don’t we, Hector? As long as you don’t mind sleeping on the sofa-bed.”

“No, but,” Miss Delaine says, sounding confused. “Wait. I—I couldn’t.”

“Nonsense,” Marnie blusters on. “You need somewhere to stay, we have somewhere to stay.”

“Marnie,” Hector says. Not a warning. Wonder. She smiles at him.

“You’ve been awfully brave tonight,” Marnie tells her. “I may not understand everything that’s gone on, but I know that. You _are_ welcome, for as long as you like.”

Almost helplessly, Miss Delaine looks at Hector for confirmation. Slowly, he puts an arm around Marnie’s shoulders and tucks her into his body. A united front. “Yes,” he says. “If you want. We’d be happy to take you in.”

Miss Delaine looks like she’s about to argue more, but something in her suddenly collapses, like an earthquake of the soul. She’s still startlingly pretty, but under the streetlights and stars she suddenly looks tired beyond belief; something about the way she slumps, like the only thing holding her up is the dress she’s packed into. “Yes,” she says with the air of a person who just wants someone else to make all the decisions right now. “Okay. Thank you.”

McCain looks fairly limp with relief as well. “Jolly good. Hector, you know where to reach me.”

Hector leads them both to the car, which gleams dully in the late-night gloom. He opens the door, first for Marnie, then for Miss Delaine. She slides in with the manner of a condemned woman. He’s about to get in himself when—

“Mr. Madden! Mr. Madden!”

It’s that scrubby little man from the newsroom. Isaac something. He’s fairly out of breath and shivering in the cold in only his shirt. Hector pauses, suddenly alert. “What is it? Is it—”

“It’s Mr. Lyon,” Isaac pants, and something about the tone of his voice—the heaviness, the fear—strikes at Marnie. In the backseat, Miss Delaine whimpers. Hector—Hector turns white as paper, white as the moon.

“What’s happened?” he asks, and the world falls apart.

— ⧗ —

Hammersmith Hospital is quieter during the night, but at all hours a respectable number of people are always bustling somewhere, from surgery, to surgery, sidling through various departments or on the way to break news, good or bad, to terrified families. The last time she was in a hospital, just this morning, she was getting the best news of her life. Now she matches Hector’s pace as they stride through corridors to get to the intensive care waiting room, Miss Delaine trailing behind them like a shadow. The decor is not inspiring. Uncomfortable chairs are arranged around the walls. A solitary plant droops in the corner. Standing beside it is Bel. She looks—

She looks _awful._ She’s still in her work clothes, the neat blue number she’s been wearing all day, but her hair is in disarray and her eyes are a vicious shade of red and when she sees Hector she just crumples. Hector sways forward to catch her, and then Bel is crying, making horrible hurt animal noises into Hector’s embrace. Marnie watches, expecting jealousy to strike at any moment—she’s forgiven Bel, of course, but old suspicions die hard—and is pleasantly surprised to find that none comes. Bel is weeping as though her lover has just died, and though Hector wraps her up in his arms, there is no passion there but a shared worry for a friend’s fate.

“Freddie—he—” Bel chokes out, then stops, as though she can’t bear to go any further.

Hector clutches her tighter. The other waiting families—and isn’t that strange, that through Hector she’s acquired a _family_ somehow on top of the one she already had and the one to come—carefully avert their eyes. Silence hangs heavy over the room.

It’s Miss Delaine, of all people, who breaks it. “Is he—will he be all right?” Miss Delaine says waveringly. Marnie turns to her, surprised, sees the tremble, the shake. Bel doesn’t even look up. Marnie looks around—no one else to answer her question—and sighs.

“Why don’t we sit,” she says. It’s not a question. She guides Miss Delaine to one of the chairs that have been engineered for maximum awfulness. Miss Delaine looks shellshocked. 

Marnie settles her skirt in place as she sits next to her. “It will be all right,” she tells Miss Delaine firmly, though of course she has no idea if anything will ever be all right again. She’d just seen Freddie last night, can remember vividly his quicksilver self and humming energy. A strangely maternal ache starts up in her chest. She still has no idea what’s happened to him, aside from the vague sense that it has to do with the story they’d reported tonight. But for the first time all night, she feels needed, and she’ll be damned if she falters now.

“No, it won’t,” Miss Delaine says, tears rising in her voice. “It’s my fault—all my fault—he only stayed to distract them so I could get away—and now he’s—”

“I’ve known Mr. Lyon for much longer than you have and I can tell you with certainty that whatever he’s gotten himself into, it was absolutely his choice and he doesn’t regret it one whit.”

“It’s too much,” Miss Delaine gasps. “First Rosa, now—everyone around me dies.”

“Now hush with that,” Marnie says severely. “This is _not_ your fault.”

“It’s me next. It’ll be me next.”

Marnie puts her hands around Miss Delaine’s, which are clenched in her lap like two little white stones. It startles her back into focus. Her glazed brown eyes flicker up slowly to meet Marnie’s gaze. “You’re safe now,” she says in the voice she uses when she arranges the menu of a party or tells Ralph to shut up. Her _it will be done_ voice.

Miss Delaine stills. Marnie watches as this beaten, out-of-her-depth showgirl looks at her, _really_ looks at her, and sees something in Marnie—backbone, perhaps, or the cool certainty of a woman whose life is in order and will kill to keep it that way—that soothes the wild and frightened animal of her heart. Marnie grips her hands more tightly, and slowly feels them relax in her grip. 

“Promise?” Miss Delaine whispers.

Marnie smiles her most dazzling smile. “Promise,” she says, and in that moment, means it.

— ⧗ —

They stay until Freddie is out of surgery and the doctors swan in to tell them that the prognosis is good. Marnie gets more details—several broken bones and part of his ribs had caved in from a savage beating, apparently by Mr. Cilenti, and she shudders because she’d smiled and made nice to him just last night as well—and decides not to share them with Miss Delaine, who is sitting on the edge of her seat, looking pale and like she’s about to be sick at any moment. Bel elects to stay until he wakes up, though it doesn’t seem to be a choice as much as a matter of being unable to imagine herself anywhere else. Hector waits with her.

So it’s Marnie who drives Miss Delaine back to the house in the wee hours of the morning. It’s very quiet; even the streetlights buzz with a kind of hushed reverence for the hour. Marnie lets herself in, half-expecting to feel the house changed from how she’d left it that morning, quite unaware that a news cycle and a doctor’s appointment would change the bent of the years ahead so dramatically. It looks the same—it’s her who’s changed. She puts the lamps on, then potters off to get Miss Delaine settled. Miss Delaine stands frozen in the doorway like the ridiculousness of this idea has only now struck her, like she’s about to bolt at any moment. Marnie takes her shoulders firmly and steers her to the sofa.

“Be a dear, help me make up the bed, won’t you?” she says calmly, and just as she’d hoped the pressure of something to do gets Miss Delaine moving mechanically. The couch is still piled with linens and pillows from the weeks Hector has spent sleeping on it. They shake out the sheets and Marnie fetches new pillowcases from the linen closet. Hector’s scent is a comfort to her, but perhaps not so much to this girl, who has just been through the most gruelling hour of her life sitting across from him and answering his questions.

She takes a spare pair of pyjamas out to Miss Delaine, who is sitting on the edge of the folded-out bed looking lost. She looks very young in that moment, and that strange maternal thing in the pit of Marnie’s stomach rears up again. It’s been overactive lately. She sets the pyjamas on the bed next to her. “When you’re ready,” she says kindly. And: “It will be better in the morning. It always is.”

“Thank you,” Miss Delaine whispers hoarsely.

Marnie smiles at her. Wonders if she's getting practice for a future daughter. “You’re very welcome. Good night, Miss Delaine.”

“Patricia.”

Marnie, halfway to her own bedroom, turns back around. “Sorry?”

“Call me Patricia,” Miss Delaine says haltingly. “I may as well get used to it.”

Marnie feels a smile curve her lips. “Good night, Patricia.”

— ⧗ —

Everything and nothing changes in the next few days. Marnie expects to feel different now that she knows she’s pregnant, but Hector’s scandal has more of an impact on her life than this quiet thing shared between husband and wife. She doesn’t go out much, preoccupied with Miss Delaine and barred from her workplace anyway, and Hector isn’t home much either. He spends long nights at the office covering for Bel and free moments at the hospital. She doesn’t blame him. The accord between them is new and fragile, but it can withstand his aching concern for a friend.

Marnie goes to visit Freddie once, bringing grapes for him and a fruit tart for Bel, whom she chases out of the room to change and bathe and nap. He’s… hard to look at. His face is purple and puffy and aside from the dark hair she can hardly recognise the man who had made her laugh so upon their first meeting, Hector’s sharp-eyed rival and friend. He hasn’t woken up yet. She pats his hand, careful to avoid the bruises, and says soothing nonsense things to him until Bel gets back. Just in case he can hear her.

Miss Delaine doesn’t go. Can’t bring herself to. That’s all right.

To pass the time, Marnie cooks. Tarts, stews, pies, quiches, soups, breads—she goes through more flour in a week than she normally does in a month. Miss Delaine hovers on the edge of the edge of the kitchen, watching her. Slowly, the colour has been returning to her face, leaving her with the pink, flushed beauty she radiates in Marnie’s memory. “How can you stand it?” she says one evening as Marnie is dicing carrots.

“Stand what?”

“All the messing about with knives and stuff. I can’t cook. Drives me crazy.”

Marnie considers. “When I’m cooking I don’t have to worry about anything else, just—is the roast done? Is the cake ready? It’s meditative, in a way. Everything else about your day can just fall away, like sand.”

“It’s like dancing,” Patricia says softly.

Marnie smiles at her. “Would you like to learn?”

Miss Delaine bites her lip. She wants to say no. Marnie can see her struggling to say no.

“Sure,” she says instead.

Slowly, slowly, Marnie guides Patricia through slicing courgettes. She gets the skirt she’s borrowed from Marnie—poor girl didn’t have anything but her purse on her when she ran from Cilenti’s goons—splattered with oil, but Marnie knows some tricks for getting the stains out. The result is a workmanlike stuffed chicken that Hector consumes numbly when he gets home from work before falling face-first into bed. Not a bad first effort; Marnie remembers her first soufflé.

Laurie’s dead. Marnie finds out when Hector staggers in one night looking paler and more haggard than usual. He eat half a slice of meatloaf and abruptly leaves so that he can cry in solitude like men do.

Miss Delaine looks like a marble statue when she hears. Marnie knows what he did to her, of course. The whole of England knows what he did to her by now; she said so on _The Hour_ for all to hear. Patricia sits proud and straight-backed, like a model, like a queen. She gives nothing away about how she feels about the death of the man who beat her and kept her, loved her and hated her.

That night, Marnie holds Hector tighter than usual. Tears soak through her nightgown, but she says nothing. That’s a wife’s job.

— ⧗ —

It’s a while before he does talk to her, but that’s progress, she supposes. Hector is attentive and loving, everything a pregnant wife could ask for, but he is also an exhausted journalist and a worried friend and juggling all three roles seems to weigh on him. He gets back particularly tired one day when Freddie is out of hospital but not yet back to work, shuffles into bed without even poking his head into the kitchen to see what Marnie (and increasingly, Patricia) had whipped up that evening, and dozes. Marnie runs through the rest of their evening routine and crawls into bed beside him like nothing is wrong. He stirs at her presence.

“Don’t mind me,” she whispers. Hector blearily puts his head on her breast, asking to be petted like a great dozy lion. She obliges.

She hesitates before she says at last, “I’m here, you know. If you wanted to tell me about it.”

Hector shakes his head, then stills. Marnie waits patiently while he finds the words. “It’s just different,” he says, “without Them there. Quieter.”

“Lonelier,” Marnie says. Hector pauses like he’s thinking of disputing it, then nods wearily.

“And I wonder… people have told me that I’m… a good journalist. A real journalist, not just a talking head. But Bel and Freddie… you never saw them, Marnie. They were brilliant. The brilliance behind the whole endeavour. I’m just me, Marnie. Without them, I’m… adrift.”

“You’re enough,” Marnie says fiercely.

Hector laughs hollowly. “I wonder about that all the time. If I’m enough of a man to carry _The Hour_ by myself. If I’ll be enough of a man to…”

“To what?”

“Be a father,” Hector whispers. “The diagnosis, you know, it confirmed everything I’d been thinking about myself. That I wasn’t meant for children. Something in my nature.”

“That’s rubbish, Hector.”

Hector smiles into her arm. “But then you had to go and be clever and get yourself pregnant anyway.” Marnie holds her breath. It’s the closest they’ve come to talking about it in so many words—their mutual infidelity—but Hector seems disinclined to press the point. Marnie strokes her hand through his hair.

“When you try,” she says slowly, because neither of them can pretend that she doesn’t need that disclaimer, “you’re a wonderful husband. And a wonderful journalist. And I’m sure you’ll be a wonderful father, too.”

Hector hmmms into her shoulder. He doesn’t sound quite convinced. But his breathing evens out and he falls back into sleep, so she assumes that’s peace of mind enough for one night.

Sometimes, Marnie thinks of herself like a great sponge, drawing out and stoppering up the worst parts of the people around her. She thinks she’s rather good at it. That’s a wife’s job, too.

— ⧗ —

Weeks go by. Months.

Freddie and Bel return and a weight lifts off Hector’s shoulders. At home, the scandal slowly begins to dissipate. Marnie is invited back to work. She enjoys it, feels more like a real homemaker now that she’s got a baby on the way. Alistair shoots her long, searching glances, sometimes—tries to touch her shoulder—she shrugs him off. She’d never formally ended their… arrangement, but they have gone months without each other at this point. Surely whatever it was between them can just die a quiet death in the annals of television production affairs.

Patricia could leave. Most of Cilenti’s men are in jail, awaiting trial. She’s as safe as she’s ever been in London. But she doesn’t try, and Marnie doesn’t ask. She teaches her how to cook, and in return Patricia hovers over her shoulder as she sweeps about the house tidying and sorting. In the evenings, Patricia and Hector treat each other with a sort of wary détente. He was one in a long line of men who used her and tossed her aside; she nearly ruined his life and career. Marnie watches as slowly, Hector forgets his own tangled history with Kiki Delaine and begins to think of her as the woman who helped him overthrow Cilenti. This, too, is fraught with complexities—it also makes her the woman who nearly got Freddie killed—but less sordid, less lurid. Marnie is satisfied with this state of things.

She starts to show.

Hector takes her shopping for maternity clothes, which she attacks with a kind of unrestrained joy. Nothing quite so fashionable as she’d like, but sacrifices must be made. She can’t stop touching the slight swell of her stomach, caressing the skin where she knows underneath something small and vulnerable and _hers_ is snug and safe. The future seems chokingly open. Hector puts his head on her stomach at night and pretends to listen. There’s nothing to hear, of course—not yet—but he murmurs encouragement to their little one like it’s just being obstinate. It makes her laugh. Every now and then she catches an awed expression on his face, like it hadn’t been real until she’d started to show. More often is a look of abject terror.

She’s folding her new clothes when Patricia, perched on the bed beside her, says suddenly, “When my mum was pregnant with me she had the most awful morning sickness.”

Marnie stops. Listens.

“She told me about it whenever I got uppity. ‘You gave your poor old mum such trouble coming into this world, you oughta be a bit nicer now.’ I never listened, of course. She said she could never keep anything down except digestives and weak tea for the first four months. But I guess when she started to show I was the calmest baby. Didn’t kick her when she was sleeping or nothing. She only had the one, my mum. Too busy with me to have another, I guess. Do you… do you want more kids?”

Marnie thinks about it. Thinks about Hector’s infertility. Thinks about what she’d have to do to get another baby. “This is it for me,” she says.

Patricia nods slowly. “My mum used to say, why mess with perfection?” She looks at her hands. “She hasn’t talked to me since the scandal broke.”

Marnie rests a hand on her shoulder and says nothing. They’re getting good at these silences. The language of understanding each other with what is not said alone.

— ⧗ —

When the blood comes, only Patricia is there.

— ⧗ —

Wrenching, cramping pain. Blue ambulance lights reflecting off of Patricia’s blonde hair. The awful impassiveness of white walls. Crying, she’s crying. Scrabbling at her stomach. No, no. Her one chance. Her one chance.

“Shh,” Patrica says, her hand moving through Marnie’s hair. “It’ll be all right.” In that moment she doesn’t look at all like the fragile girl Marnie had gathered up and taken back home. She looks the way she looked that night on television: remote, bold, like a goddess deigning to pass judgement on mere mortals. Marnie clutches at her wrist and Patricia rubs circles into her palm.

“It’ll be all right,” she tells Marnie, and Marnie believes her.

— ⧗ —

Hector gets there as soon as he can, and Marnie cringes to think of him weaving through traffic, hurling himself to her side. But for the first hour, it’s only Patricia there. Patricia, calm and steady as the tide. Patricia, soaking up her terror like a sponge. Patricia, a bulwark of strength against the coming darkness. Patricia, whispering the lullaby Marnie vaguely remembers her mother singing, the one she had hoped to sing herself someday.

And when the doctor enters to give her the news, it’s Patricia holding her hand.

**Author's Note:**

> Up to you whether Marnie miscarries or just has a bad case of placenta previa. Be kind to her!
> 
> Take a comment, leave a concrit. If you like my work and want to support me, buy me a coffee.


End file.
